The Adventures of Mark Twain

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985), also known as Comet Quest in the United Kingdom, is an American stop-motion claymation fantasy film directed by Will Vinton and starring James Whitmore. It received a limited theatrical release in May 1985 and was released on DVD in January 2006 and again as a collector's edition in 2012 on DVD and Blu-ray. The film features a series of vignettes extracted from several of Mark Twain's works, woven together by a plot that follows Twain's attempts to keep his "appointment" with Halley's Comet. Twain and three children, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher, travel on an airship to various adventures, encountering characters from Twain's stories along the way. Plot In the 1985 film The Adventures of Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer sneak aboard an airship piloted by Mark Twain in their dreams of becoming famous aeronauts. After a bout of one-upmanship, Becky Thatcher follows them to call their bluff. The balloon takes off and the stowaways are soon discovered, but they are surprised to learn that Twain already knows their names. Upon seeing the frog the boys had caught outside of town, Twain relates his first popular short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The boys learn that Twain intends to pilot the airship to meet Halley's Comet, and are worried that this goal will end in their deaths. They stumble upon the Index-o-Vator, a strange elevator that can take them to any part of the vessel, or into any of Twain's writing. Using it, they meet up with Twain and Becky, who is intrigued by a coin-operated automaton of Adam and Eve. Twain takes the chance to begin telling them the story of Adam and Eve, based on his stories Eve's Diary and Extracts from Adam's Diary. The story comes to a halt when a real storm surrounds the airship just as storm clouds fill the Garden of Eden. Twain quickly coaches the kids on how to pilot the ship, but they fail to avoid smashing into a mountain and losing a chunk of the hull.